


Not Even In Question

by Beleriandings



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: F/M, Falling In Love, Kinslaying, Marriage, Multi, Sexual Content, Violence, actually more like the ways LaCE is incredibly damaging, flings with the wrong people, semi-canonical Fëanorian wives, subversion of LaCE
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-11
Updated: 2014-07-11
Packaged: 2018-02-08 11:21:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1939101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beleriandings/pseuds/Beleriandings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story of Maglor and his wife, from the early happy days together in the Years of the Trees to the aftermath of the kinslaying at Alqualondë.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Even In Question

**Author's Note:**

> In many ways this is as much a story about how the expectations set by the Valar (see the Laws and Customs of the Eldar) are unhealthy and harmful to relationships and people as an exploration of the relationship of Maglor and his wife. 
> 
> Also, spot the references to events from my other stories!

The first time Mírilindë met the Prince, the circumstances, they both later agreed, could certainly have been more auspicious. He was lingering outside the stage door as she slipped out into the alley. It had begun to rain; he had put the collar of his coat up, heavy drops darkening the wine-red velvet and pasting bedraggled tendrils of hair down over his forehead.

She pursed her lips. “Yes? Can I help you?”

 

He stared intently at her, scrutinising her face. “No” he said at last, looking somewhat melancholy.

“Then be off with you. The theatre is closed for the night. Go on. Shoo!”

He looked a little taken aback. “I was waiting for someone.”

Mírilindë raised an eyebrow. “Oh really? Who?”

He went a little pink and looked at the ground for a moment. “I don’t… precisely know her name. She was here two nights ago, leading the dance school performance? I meant to talk to her on the way out, but I missed her.”

Mírilindë found it hard to keep from laughing. “Are you a dancer too then?”

“No… I was accompanying them on the viol as a favour for my former music tutor who now teaches at the dance school. But there was this girl…” his face became a little wistful. “We met afterwards, everyone went out to the square and we drank wine and…” he shook his head a little. “I never asked her name though. She had curly brown hair and brown eyes, like… well, like yours, a little, except…” he gestured helplessly.

She knew who he was now, for his name had been on every set of lips two nights ago, rather eclipsing the names of the dancers. But she did not tell him this. “If I tell you her name, do you promise to stop skulking in the alleyway?” she asked instead.

He looked at her hopefully. “You know her then?”

“Know her? She’s my sister, Elairë of the house of Lindorien. The most promising dancer in all Tirion, to hear her teachers tell it.”

His face broke out in a smile. “I would agree with them there.” Then he seemed to remember his manners. “Forgive me. I realise I never told you my name. I am - ”

“…The great, exulted Prince Kanafinwë Macalaurë of the house of Fëanáro, yes, I gathered.”

He looked surprised. “How did you - ”

She gave him a brief, ironic bow. “Your name precedes you. Also, I was at the performance two nights ago. I am Mírilindë of the house of Lindorien, although I’d forgive you if you didn’t know our family’s name. I’m the assistant stage manager. I was sitting in the wings for most of the performance, watching and hoping that the less talented dancers wouldn’t knock over parts of the the set.”

He seemed quite unabashed. They shook hands formally. “Well, Mírilindë of the house of Lindorien, it has been a pleasure to make your acquiantance.”

“Likewise. But really though, can you please not lurk around in the alley next time?”

“I wasn’t - ”

“Yes you were.”

—— 

Mírilindë burst into Elairë’s room without knocking and threw herself down into the armchair, atop a pile of clothes. “Get that wet cloak of yours off my dress” protested Elairë.

Mírilindë ignored her. “El, it seems the Prince is half in love with you. Thought you should know.”

“The – what are you talking about, Lindë?”

“Prince Macalaurë. Turned up at the stage door as I was leaving, asking after you.”

Elairë raised an eyebrow, blushing a little. “What did you tell him?”

“Your name. It was on the tickets and the bills too. He could easily have looked.”

Elairë laughed. “Well, they do say that love can turn the most sensible people quite mad.”

———— 

Mírilindë had almost forgotten the incident, until one night a few weeks later when she was awoken by the sound of a loud curse and a muffled crash from the direction of the garden.

Slipping on her boots, she went to seek the source of the sound, knocking on her sister’s door, for Elairë had a balcony that looked out over almost the exact spot.

"Elairë?" Mírilindë knocked gently. “El?”

Getting no answer, Mírilindë quietly let herself in. Framed in the open balcony window, looking down into the garden was Elairë. Her hands were raised to cover her mouth in shock, and she appeared frozen in place. Mírilindë went to stand beside her, following her gaze down to the ground where a section of the vines that climbed the wall had been torn away, and a figure dressed in a dark red velvet coat and still holding a small, broken lute lay sprawled amidst them, letting out a quiet moan of pain. Mírilindë gave her sister a pointed look. “Something you neglected to tell me?”

“He was so charming, that’s all.” said Elairë hastily. She started to blush. “He would sing to me, and… well, it was never a serious thing between us. Oh, but I do hope he’s alright.” 

———- 

As it turned out, Macalaurë was alright, if a little bruised in both body and pride. Elairë too was true to her word; within a couple of weeks her attachment to Macalaurë had ended. (“A bit of fun over a summer” Elairë called it. “A silly thing.” Mírilindë was inclined to agree.)

But Mírilindë still saw the Prince sometimes. His fame was growing, she knew, as he left his years of study behind and his compositions became more widely performed. He was often at the theatre these days, and not as an accompanist only; he would perform himself, or sometimes he would sit in the front row at the premier of one of his operas or symphonies, or at a recitation of one of his poems. She watched from the wings, as usual. When they chanced to meet backstage, they went from nodding terms to smiles and tentative hellos to the odd conversation. At some point, although Mírilindë could not exactly say  _which_  point, they became something approximating friends.

One day Macalaurë was playing, the music he had written rising up as the masked dancers spun past each other, telling the play’s story with stylised motions. A silhouetted figure stood there, watching him from backstage. He was tall, much taller than Mírilindë herself, and she could see the stage lights shining in his rich red hair. She guessed she knew who this was, although she had never seen him up close before.

“Who are you? And what are you doing here?” she hissed at him, despite all that. He turned and his face left her in no doubt that this was Macalaurë’s brother.

His looked endearingly startled, spreading his freckled hands in front of him in a gesture of peace. “I… I’m watching the play…” He looked young, younger than Macalaurë, although she knew he was older.

Afterwards, she could never quite explain her precise motivation for doing what she did then. His silver eyes never left her as she tugged him to a deserted corridor, as they talked in hushed voices. Those bright eyes ( _so like his brother’s_ , she found herself thinking,  _but paler. Macalaurë’s eyes were like tiny stormclouds_ ) widened in belated understanding as they found themselves leaning close together, then closed as their lips brushed against each other in a chaste kiss. The music seemed to fade as their mouths opened together, arms winding about one another in the half-light. A thrill went through her, for she was kissing a Prince, the brother of her friend, in the theatre where she worked, and if anyone should come around the corner…

She was, as it happened, barely missed. By the time the play ended, they were lying half-clothed and dishevelled, bodies pressed close together on the low divan in Macalaurë’s dressing room. Maitimo’s eyes were far away. He was beautiful with his tousled red hair and pale, freckled skin, she knew, and those silver eyes were certainly impressive. Like cold fire. Mírilindë felt something as she looked at him, something she could not quite identify. It was as though she had been looking for something and had  _almost_  found it, but not quite.

Perhaps he had not found it either. He kissed her softly, respectfully, collected his remaining clothes and left before the final curtain, without another word.

————

Macalaurë  _knew._  Mírilindë was certain of that as soon as she saw him again, several days later. Their greetings were tense, clipped, their conversation reduced to banal smalltalk. It was Macalaurë that broke first, his beautiful voice dropping like a stone into the uncomfortable silence that had fallen between them.

“So. You fucked my brother.”

She gave a half shrug. “You fucked my sister. Fair’s fair.”

The corner of Macalaurë’s mouth twitched. “Can’t argue with that.”

The silence stretched on a little longer. “Maitimo is still searching” said Macalaurë at last.

“For what?”

“The one for him.”

“Well, I’m reasonably certain it’s not  _me,_  if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Macalaurë chuckled quietly. “Don’t worry. I wasn’t under that impression. I just hope he’s happy.” He gave Mírilindë a sharp look. “What about you, Mírilindë?”

“What  _about_  me?”

“Are you happy?”

She considered this for a moment. “I’ve got no idea.”

And that was the last they said of it.

———— 

They began to meet outside of the theatre. Incidentally at first, in the square or in the city’s gardens on festival days. They would swap stories, joke and laugh at people passing by. Sometimes they would go to a café and order drinks, sitting for hours side by side, sometimes talking and sometimes in silence. But it was a silence of the companionable sort.

She never saw much of his brothers, or at least not as much as would have been expected. Sometimes he came to visit her house, and they would sit in the garden and talk. And if this would sometimes cause Elairë to raise an eyebrow, then Mírilindë was well accustomed to pretending not to notice. Often Macalaurë would play for her, or sing; silly songs mostly, things that made her laugh, (“I’m sick to death of beautiful but sad things” he would claim, and she would tease him that the majority of his compositions were exactly that) and yet his voice went through her like a blade every time, no less sharp the twelfth time or the sixtieth time than the very first. 

Mírilindë could sing too, and although she had not particularly wanted to sing in front of him before, he managed to coax her into it. He had a way with words. And though her voice was nothing compared to his, though when he tried to teach her the harp she was slow to master it, her fingers fumbling at first, he never said or did anything that made her feel as though it were a fault in her.

 _Was this still the romantic fool that had attempted to climb up to Elairë’s window?_  Mírilindë wondered occasionally, hardly able to associate the Macalaurë she had first met with the friend she had so unexpectedly acquired. Perhaps she too had changed, but she was certain he was different, more acerbic, sharper of tongue, less given to melancholy. And yet, in a strange way, he was exactly the same.

They sat in the garden one day as the lights began to mingle. Sometimes Macalaurë went away for long periods of time; his father took him and his brothers travelling, she knew. They did not speak much of these times, and Macalaurë never pressed the point.

That evening, Macalaurë had just returned, his skin a scant shade more brown from being outside in the Treelight, looking a little weary but happy. He always looked like that when he returned, almost imperceptibly different, as if the trips drew something from him and replaced it with something else.

He sat down beside her in the grass by way of greeting, lying back on the ground and stretching his long limbs contentedly.

“Good trip?”

“Indeed.” He sounded bored. “We found a new deposit of iron ore that not even Atar or Amil knew about before. Well, actually, it was Maitimo that found it.”

“How is Maitimo?”

Macalaurë sat up again. “He’s fine.” He gave her a sharp look, and his next words came quickly, his voice conspiratorial. “Do you know, here we all were expecting him to get married, but it looks as though he never will now!”

“Really? Why?”

“You remember what I said about - ”

“Oh. Oh, yes, you said he was still  _searching._ ” She laughed. “Has he found his ‘one’ then? Is she someone eminently unsuitable?”

He gave her an appraising look, as though trying to decide how much to say.

“Go on, Macalaurë, out with it! You can’t tease me with the promise of gossip and then leave me. It’s simply not fair.”

“This is not for gossiping” he said sternly. “It’s… Findekáno.”

“Oh, since when have I gossiped?” she scoffed. “Besides, the only person I would care enough to tell is you, and you’re… wait…  _Findekáno_? You mean  _that_  Findekáno…?”

“Yes.”

“ _Prince_  Findekáno? The son of Prince Ñolofinwë?”

“What other?”

“Your  _cousin_?”

Macalaurë bristled a little. “ _Half_ cousin.”

Mírilindë sucked in air through her teeth. “Well, either way, he does sound rather unsuitable. Poor Maitimo.”

“He seems to be happy though” said Macalaurë thoughtfully. They both lay back in the grass. There was another long silence. “Lindë?” asked Macalaurë at last.

“Hmm?”

“Do you believe… in what the Valar say? That there’s just one person for everyone, and that you are destined to be with that person? And that the first time you see them then…  _bam_ ” he flicked a crumpled ball of grass cuttings into the air “…there it is, and you know that’s the person for you? And do some people never find out if the one they think is the right one actually is?”

She considered this for a moment. “If there were only one person for everyone then your cousins… very sorry, your  _half_ -cousins wouldn’t even exist. As for seeing someone and knowing…” she grinned. “I’m probably not the best person to give you advice on the subject.”

“Mmm.”

“Why do you ask?”

“No reason.”

They lay back on the grass for a while longer. Macalaurë’s eyes were closed, face turned up towards the sky. Mírilindë watched him. The wind stirred his hair, and a strand snagged against his nose, fluttering there for a moment. On an impulse she sat up and extended her hand to brush it away, but at the same time he reached up to do the same, and their hands collided in the air. Macalaurë’s eyes flicked open. Mírilindë snatched her hand back a little too quickly, feeling her cheeks flush slightly.

“Sorry!”

Macalaurë sat up too, many expressions flitting across his mobile features. “Nothing to be sorry for.”

And then she was kissing him, fiercely and a little clumsily. He pulled her towards him, his arms about her waist, and her fingers tangled in his hair. Suddenly they drew apart, staring at each other. There was surprise in Macalaurë’s eyes, she saw, as well as not a little smugness. “Káno, wipe that smirk off your face. It does not become you.”

Their lips collided once more, deepening the kiss, leaving them both breathless, drunk on the very fact that it had happened at all. ( _And why ever hadn’t it before_ , Mírilindë found herself wondering.) They were far enough from the house that it was easy for them to slip unnoticed into a little glade of trees. It was easy, too, for their hands to roam over each other’s bodies, fumbling clumsily with buttons and laces, neither wanting to pull away from the heat of the other’s embrace. It was easy for their hands to slip lower, easy enough lie together in the grass and to wring whimpers of pleasure from the other which had to muffled by a bitten lip, or stifled by a hasty kiss. It felt quite the easiest thing in the world.

They spoke little after. Macalaurë seemed almost drowsy, except for his eyes which flicked restlessly over her, to the trees around them, to the sky above.

“You’ve got grass in your hair” said Mírilindë.

“So have you.”

Suddenly it all seemed very funny, and laughter bubbled at both their lips, rising out of their control. They clung to each other’s arms and their foreheads touched as they tried to bite back the mirth and the sky silvered overhead.

————-

If Mírilindë was surprised by anything, it was by how little changed after that. She still worked at the theatre, and Macalaurë would still see her sometimes, although these days he was so busy that it was not as often as she would have liked. The only difference now was that occasionally they would kiss – although never in public – and when they got the chance they would steal a moment alone to each lose themselves in the other, to forget, briefly, the outside world.

“Maybe I should write  _you_  a song” said Macalaurë one day as they lay wound together one day on the floor of his dressing room after a concert. His long fingers tapped idly against her hip, some quick rhythm that she almost recognised. It was a habit he had.

“Is that a threat?”

He feigned affront. “Seems about time I did, that’s all.”

She gave an exaggerated sigh, but in her heart something, she realised, was dancing. “All right. If you must.”

“Perhaps I will.” 

————

He knew her family well by now, but she had barely met his. “I keep forgetting you’re a Prince, and a son of Fëanáro to boot” she said once. She had a little Telerin blood from a few generations back, and her father was a known follower of Prince Arafinwë. Remembering who Macalaurë really was always made her a little nervous.

He half smiled at that. “So do I.”

She swatted him lightly on the side of the head with the corner of her cloak. “Liar. No you don’t.”

His face went serious suddenly. “You’re right. I don’t.”

Macalaurë was away often, these days. Fëanáro, it was whispered by the gossips in the streets, was restless, his trips to the very edges of Aman growing longer and closer together. Often he would take his sons with him, and Mírilindë found that during these times when he was away that she would grow restless too. Her job occupied her time, but it seemed not enough any more, somehow. She read widely. She went to the discussion salons hosted by Princess Lalwendë in Tirion. It was there that she learned of the anti-Valar mutterings that were spreading in the city, on pamphlets furtively handed out on street corners and cafés. The movement used the star of Fëanáro as a symbol, which made Mírilindë frown, not liking the implications. But she read their literature anyway, resolving to keep an open mind.

Mírilindë had never been particularly political. She drifted away entirely when a friend she had made, Carnimeldë of the house of Mahtan, got her involved in a scuffle in a tavern over an offhand remark on the validity of the laws and customs that the Valar approved for them. Some of the views Carnimeldë put forward were… compelling, she had to admit. But Mírilindë’s great fear was that her family would find out, and so she went back to simply reading, and trying to untangle the knotted thoughts that crowded in her head on her own.

————-

Her friends of her own age were marrying all around her.

“What if…” said Macalaurë one day, slurring a little as they passed a bottle of wine between them and contemplated the next wedding invitation, “…what if  _we_  got married?”

She took a swig of wine, laughing at the same time and coughing a little. He patted her on the back genially.

“Out of the question. Your family would loath me.”

“Why do you think that?”

She shrugged. “Well, I’m hardly Prince-marrying material, am I?”

He frowned, watching her. “What does that even mean?”

She gave a quiet laugh. “I don’t know. I’m a little drunk, Káno. Can’t think.” Her head lay on Macalaurë’s shoulder and he leaned back against her. He hummed a tune contemplatively.

“I think Amil would like you” he said after a while. “Atar too. And if any of my brothers didn’t, well… they would just have to learn to live with it, wouldn’t they?”

She opened her eyes wide. “Wait… you were serious? You actually want to get married.”

“Don’t you?”

“Well… at some point… to  _someone_ , maybe…”

“Oh. Oh I see.”

She flushed. “No! No, that’s not what I meant. I just… Káno, if you’re going to  _marry_  someone aren’t you supposed to… to be in…” she stopped speaking.

“To be in love? You’re my best friend, Lindë, and I think…” he took a breath. “I think I am in love with you.”

“I think I am too” she admitted at length, realising the truth of the words as they slipped from her mouth. “But surely there’s all that stuff about meeting the person you are meant to be with in a blaze of light, and knowing that they are the one for you from the moment you see them, all that… remember what we were talking about that time?” Her brow furrowed. “Isn’t it supposed to be like that?”

“  _‘Supposed to?’_  Perhaps.” His lips curled into a grin and he kissed the corner of her mouth, a little clumsily. “I’m fairly sure we’ve done a lot we’re not  _supposed_  to do already.”

She cupped his face in her hands and kissed him back, her mind stretching back to that day in the garden, and the things they had spoken of.

“If I ever were to love anyone in that sense…” she thought aloud. “Well, then it would surely be you, but…”

“But? But what?”

“It seems… different. Than the Valar say. Than people say.”

“You watch too many plays, Lindë.”

“You’re one to talk! How long has it been exactly since you last wrote sugary romantic poetry?”

He gave her a lopsided grin. “ _Well excuse you_ , my poetry is wonderful.”

She frowned at him suspiciously, his face open and hopeful. “Eru, Káno, you’re completely serious about this, aren’t you. Tell me you didn’t prepare engagement rings.”

“No, but… I could! I could make them.”

She snorted.

“I  _could_!” He protested. “My father did teach me something of jewellery making when I was younger, you know. It’s hard to escape it in our house.”

“Ha! I’d do anything to see you in the forge.”

“ _Anything_ …? Even marry me…?”

“You rogue. Maybe.”

————

The very next time she saw him, the first word out of her mouth was “yes!” followed by a hasty “if the offer still stands. The marriage one, that is.”

His face broke into a smile. “I was beginning to despair that when you had sobered up you would have seen sense, and your ‘maybe’ would have turned to a ‘no’.

“I  _did_ see sense. It’s just that my ‘maybe’ turned into a ‘yes’.” 

————

They were married by the year’s end. ( _Will things be different when we’re husband and wife?_  They had asked each other many times during their engagement.  _Will we be different?_ )

Mírilindë had met Macalaurë’s family now, properly. Fëanáro, whose eyes burned almost disconcertingly silver, who always gave the impression of knowing more than everyone else in the room combined, but (Mírilindë found) was nowhere near as difficult to get along with as people made him out to be. Nerdanel, who was unfailingly kind, smelling perpetually of stone dust and the almond salve she rubbed into her work-chapped hands, asking Mírilindë questions about the theatre to move the conversation along when uncomfortable subjects came up. (There were, she soon realised, more uncomfortable subjects in the house of Fëanáro than in any family she could think of.) Nerdanel’s voice was warm and low with a hint of gravel in it, but could be soothing or sharp as the crack of a whip, as she chose. She began to see where Macalaurë got it from.

Then there were his brothers. Maitimo was as gracious and kind as ever, and as soon as she saw his eyes she knew that nothing would ever be strained or wrong between the two of them. Tyelkormo gave her a rakish grin and asked her why she was wasting her time on his brother, but later took her aside and told her, blushing a little, that he was happy for the two of them. She found herself rather growing to like him after that.

She wanted to like Carnistir too, but when he was in one of his black moods she found him entirely opaque. (“It’s alright” said Macalaurë with a slight grimace. “We’re all convinced his he’s got a sweet, sensitive heart in there somewhere. He just shows it… extremely rarely.”) Young Curufinwë looked, predictably, exactly like their father, but rather quieter. (“He’s engaged himself” said Macalaurë. “He thinks we don’t know about her, but we all do.” He laughed. “My only aspiration is to find out who she is before the wedding.”) The twins were on the cusp of adulthood, all coltish limbs and red hair and freckles like their mother and eldest brother. Mírilindë found herself unable to resist becoming fast friends with them.

The wedding was a large, elaborate affair, which, she supposed, would be the everyday reality of marriage into the royal family. Macalaurë had, rather endearingly, wanted to provide all the music himself, although he had relented when she had pointed out that he would be busy getting married at the time. Elairë, who was a talent almost as well-known as Macalaurë in Tirion now, managed to get the greatest dancers in Aman together to provide entertainment for the guests. There was a cake almost as tall as Mírilindë herself was, and a vast, confounding tribe of new royal cousins to meet whose names she had spent an evening memorising in anticipation of the date.

He wore silver and she wore gold, as per custom, and they danced until they could not dance anymore, and then they watched the other dancers for a while, their hands just touching between them. They watched Maitimo and Findekáno talking animatedly in a corner, their faces close together, and Irissë and Tyelkormo spinning on the dancefloor.

“What is it with your family and cousins?” said Mírilindë, giving Macalaurë a slight elbow in the ribs. “Go on then, you may as well tell me now. Were you ever tempted…?”

He grinned. “Well… there was that one time with Findaráto…”

She elbowed him again, harder this time. “I swear, I never know whether you’re making things up or not.”

Their laughter subsided. The guests were thinning out now. “Where’s Elairë?” asked Mírilindë after a while.

Macalaurë scanned the scene before them. Then he gave a snort of laughter and pointed into a far corner. “ _There’s_  Elairë.”

And there she was, caught between Irissë and Tyelkormo, the closeness and manner of their embrace leaving Mírilindë in no doubt that three of them would be fully occupied together for the short-term future at least. “Talk about fostering bonds between the two families” she said dryly.

 ———-

“It’s our wedding night” said Mírilindë, with a grin, when they were alone. She still could not quite believe it, but saying it out loud made it sound at least slightly more real. They had been given a suite in the palace for the night, a heavy four-poster bed with cream-coloured hangings.

“It is” said Macalaurë with a smile. “Eru knows my damned brothers have been teasing me about it for long enough.”

She took his hand. “Well how about we test the proposition that things will be different as husband and wife?”

“I hope they won’t be _too_  different” – he kissed her softly, and then looked down at her face in the lamplight. “Except now we have an actual bed rather than the ground or that awful divan in my dressing room.”

“We do. And a very fancy one too” she tugged at the hangings with one hand, slipping the other around his waist. “Is this what my life will be now?”

“If you want it to be, Lindë.”

They spoke little after that, lost in each other and caught up in the bright joy of the day. Their hands were strangely tentative as she unhooked the clasps on his silver brocade wedding robes, slowly and deliberately, and he slipped her dress from her shoulders. It laced down the back and his long pale fingers, usually so deft and clever, fumbled at the ribbons. Their love-making (and, she supposed, they could call it that now. Why hadn’t they called it that before?) was imbued with a stronger sense of purpose, almost. She was not sure what to think of that, and did not welcome the thought of the One watching over them in this, even to bless their union.

But he made up for it, all of it. She smiled into the warm skin of his neck as they fell onto that wide bed, wrapped close in each other’s arms. When finally he was inside her, it felt the same as always, her own dear friend of many years who she had come to love deeply and unreasonably, somewhere along the way. They could have this until the ending of the world, and that heady knowledge buoyed her up.

When at last they fell asleep, much later, they clung to each other though the night was hot, revelling in not having to hide anymore. Macalaurë hummed a melody to himself under his breath, his long, dark eyelashes fluttering as he sank into sleep, and she felt, in that moment, that everything was right. 

————

“We should have a child. I mean… if you want to.”

He voiced the thought unexpectedly one day, years later, as he spoke so many thoughts just as they occurred to him.

She gave him a look. “What, because you saw me bounce little Tyelpë on my knee, and now you want one of your own?”

“ _Our_  own, yes. Imagine a little baby with your curly hair” – he tugged at a curl of her hair, and it bounced back into place, causing a smile of childish delight to break across his face – “and my eyes. Or the other way around. Or twins!”

“Eru forbid, twins!” She grimaced. And yet she could not deny that the idea of children had been one that had occurred to her too. Macalaurë would sing their children to sleep every night and she would tell them stories. She found the thought made her smile.

————-

Intent, the Valar taught. Children were begotten with intent.  _Well,_ thought Mírilindë bitterly,  _we both have plenty of that_. And yet she had not become pregnant, her stomach staying resolutely flat.

 _It’s not your fault,_  he would whisper, for he was far too good at telling what she was thinking now. Other couples had had to wait even longer, this she knew for a fact.  _It was common for children not to come when they were first thought of, and be all the more loved by their parents for it_ , they were assured by sympathetic strangers who seemed to know much more about their lives than Mírilindë would have liked.

_It’s not your fault._

Sometimes she even believed it.

 ————

“Do you think” she asked Macalaurë one day as the rain came down outside and he sat tuning his harp, “that it was because we were not each other’s first? That Eru is punishing us?”

“That’s just superstition” said Macalaurë, frowning down at his harp. But she knew him well enough to tell that he the same thought had crossed his mind.

She continued, feeling a little reckless now. “Do you think it’s because we never had that moment when you see the other person and your life changes like  _that_?” she snapped her fingers. “Is it because we were friends for so long first? Is it because we fucked before we made love, and both before we were married?” Her voice felt jagged in her throat. “What did they  _want_  from us?”

He did not answer.

“Are you listening to me, Macalaurë?”

His head snapped up, and his face was full of pain. “Well, what do you  _want_  me to say?”

“Just say  _something_ ” she muttered.

He stood up, abandoning his harp, and went to sit beside her. She leaned against his shoulder and he kissed her forehead and then the tip of her ear. She found herself drawing some scant comfort from his touch. “I think you might be right” he said at last, haltingly. “But that doesn’t mean we will  _never_  have a child. Have hope, Lindë.”

She sighed. “I do, Káno. I do.”

———

Formenos was cold, and darker than she had expected this far from the Trees. It was strange to leave her family, but, she reasoned, it was only twelve years. That was not such a terribly long time, and Elairë sent her long, talkative letters and baskets of their mother’s baking at regular intervals. They would weather this storm. They had to.

Nerdanel had not though. Mírilindë had almost been unable to stand the look in her eyes as she said goodbye to her sons. Nerdanel had come to Tirion from her father’s house to see them off. Maitimo had looked crumpled, his face grey and his eyes puffy and red, as though he had not slept in days; perhaps he had not. They had all pretended not to see. Fëanáro had stood by, his blazing eyes fixed on a locked strongbox he would carry in his lap for the journey, that he would entrust to no one else. He did not look at Nerdanel, and she did not look at him. Mírilindë herself had simply kept hold of Macalaurë’s hand, clinging to it as though for her very life.  _I will never leave him_ , she thought.  _Never._

Nerdanel said goodbye to each of them individually, her head held high and proud as she held each of them in turn, her sons and their wives and her father-in-law and little Tyelperinquar, asleep in his mother’s arms. Then Nerdanel was gone, turning her face resolutely away, never looking back.

Mírilindë remembered this as she looked out from the balcony cut into the rock wall of the great mountain stronghold of Formenos. At her feet the world fell away into a deep stony gorge, with only a low wall to keep her from falling, that too hewn from the living rock. The chill wind tugged at her hair, and a sudden, violent shiver ran through her.

She felt Macalaurë’s arms around her. She never heard him when he came to her; he knew how to be silent on his feet. But she felt herself instinctively lean back into those arms, felt the tension in her muscles relax a little.  _It will be over soon, she told herself. Everything will return to normal. We will be happy._

———— 

It was dark now. It was hard to know what time of day it was supposed to be without the Trees, and Mírilindë’s eyes prickled with tiredness after many nights of sleeping only in short bursts, at the wrong times.

“You’re going with him” Elairë had said, her voice toneless, when they had met again.

It had not been a question, but Mírilindë had answered it. “Yes.” There had never been any doubt about that, not in her mind. Macalaurë’s face had frightened her as she watched him swear the Oath, bathed in the bloody light of the flames. Yet it was not fear for herself than boiled up in her throat, but for him. She could not quite put a name to the exact cause of the fear (although she had seen Finwë’s head after it had been split, his blood soaking the stones of Formenos;  _that would not happen again_ , she told herself.  _Not to Macalaurë. Not to anyone.) a_ nd yet she felt she had to be there, at his side, as useless as she would quite probably be in the face of the evil that they had pitted themselves against.

Her parents had known she would go too. Their quiet, resigned acquiescence hurt her more than tears or raised voices ever could have. _Prince Arafinwë is going_ , she could almost hear them thinking,  _and that is something at least_.  _He would help to bring some sense and reason to his brothers._  That was, she knew, the hope they clung to, and she would not take it from them.

————-

He was covered in blood, and she almost cried out when she saw him, biting down on her lip so hard that she tasted the iron tang of her own blood. He was cleaning his twin blades, his face a blank mask. She knew that look.  _That was the face he made when he was hurt inside, when he didn’t want anyone to know…_  she felt fury rise unbidden inside her as he caught sight of her, spreading his hands and opening his mouth to speak. She did not let him.

“What did you  _do_?” she choked out, knowing it was a pointless question. The bodies in the water, the blood-soaked boards of the pier, and the red that covered those hands that she loved all attested to that. The hands that had touched every inch of her, that had flickered up and down her spine as if she were some fine and delicate musical instrument, that had drawn breathless whimpers from her lips. The long, elegant fingers that had played the harp, the lute, the flute; the hands that she had liked to bunch to her mouth and kiss on the knuckles, those hands were now covered in blood, encrusted in the corners of his fingernails and the lines of his palms. And yet his face was the same, raw and fresh pain in his gaze, and despite herself she longed to go to him, to comfort him… revulsion coiled inside her. She gritted her teeth, beginning to turn away.

“Lindë…”

“ _Don’t_ call me that.”

“I wanted… I wanted to tell you, but it all started so quickly, Atar was - ”

“You  _wanted to tell me_? As if that makes it any  _better_?” She felt a bark of bitter laughter tearing at her throat.

“I… I am sorry this happened.”

Before she realised what she was doing she was raising a fist to strike him, but even before the blow could connect she found the force going out of it, her arm dropping limply to her side. She felt hot tears start in her eyes, leaning forward and balling both hands into fists. Even now, she could not bring herself to hurt him, not even in her fury. And he had not moved when she had gone to hit him, he had not even flinched. If she had gone through with it he would simply have stood and taken the onslaught. She hated him for that, hated him more in that moment than she had hated anyone or anything in her life. And yet she loved him still. That was the very worst of it. It would be her undoing, she thought. 

There was a long silence. Finally Mírilindë spoke in a small, cracked voice. “Are you going to get on one of those ships tomorrow then?”

He paused, almost imperceptibly. “Yes.”

“Then you’re  _not_  sorry. Not really.”

“I…” There was another long pause, during which Macalaurë seemed to see through her, to realise what she was thinking. “You’re not going to…?”

She turned away, biting her lip once more, her face twisting with frustration.

————— 

It was easy to say that she was going back to Tirion with Arafinwë. It seemed the perfect get-out, a golden opportunity made just for her.  _For the sake of my family,_  she told people, and it was even mostly true. Her parents had been right, she told herself in that moment. She told herself that she was doing it for them, and for Elairë. It was not as though it was an uncommon decision. Many would be making their weary way back to Tirion, a little grey band that followed their golden Prince, their hope of salvation amid the blood and the darkness. That was what she told herself later. At the time though, she merely wanted to run, to get as far away from that place as possible, away from him and his family, away from everything that had happened since the exile to Formenos, or possibly some distant happy day long before.

Before she left, she picked up her small bundle of possessions. He was there, of course, still awake. He had scrubbed the blood from his skin now, but she could still see it when she closed her eyes, a grisly after-image that blazed brighter than the real Macalaurë standing before her, seared into her vision as though she had stared too long at a bright light. His eyes were stormy, many conflicting emotions playing across them. One was almost hope. She wished her gaze alone would cut him, make him bleed.  

“You’re leaving” he stated.

Her lip curled in contempt. “Well spotted.”

“You’re a coward.” He said it blandly, with no intonation.

“No. I’m just not a killer, Macalaurë, and I don’t blindly follow your father. Learn the difference.”

She thought for a single wild moment that he might hit her then, but he did not. They were standing close together now, their gazes burning through each other for a long instant before their lips crashed together in a desperate, violent kiss. The cut where she had bitten her lip split open once again, and the taste of her blood filled both their mouths. She thought of pulling him to her, of embracing him and making his body arch with pleasure under her, of seizing a handful of his hair and tugging until he cried out. Of making him come inside her, his head tilting back, his beautiful mouth falling half open. His golden voice saying her name. But she knew that if she did these things she would weaken; she would never be able to leave him behind. Her resolve snapped tight, and she pushed him away, slinging her bundle over her shoulder. She did not look back.

————

Tirion was much as she remembered it, almost disturbingly so. The streets were the same, the shops, the cafés, the main square with its fountain. The palace and gardens. Everywhere was tinged with memory though, and absence. Most of the population had gone and the streets were eerily empty, many shops boarded up, the fountain dry. Everything was empty and dark.

Elairë held her in her arms when she got home. In her sister’s embrace, Mírilindë’s tears flowed freely, no longer hot and fierce, but the kind of tears that are a warm balm; the kind that cleanse and heal. And yet she did not feel cleansed, or healed, no matter how many tears she shed. She felt as though she had cried a whole salty ocean with those tears, an ocean to rival the one that her Macalaurë had paid his way across in blood. Elairë let her sob, hardly speaking, but listening when Mírilindë needed her to. It helped, a little, and that night she fell into a bone-deep, dreamless sleep, for the first time in longer than she cared to think about.

Life was strange and slow and dark. The theatre was closed up; of course it was, much of the population of Tirion had gone across the sea, and lampstones could not be spared for stage lighting. There was already a backlog on production of lampstones, and wood and oil too were running short. These days, light and heat were precious commodities.

She loathed herself for how soon she found that she missed him. Once she heard someone in the street humming a well-known melody that he had composed - an unusual thing in itself in this new world, at best inappropriate and at worst downright dangerous. As for Mírilindë, she had had to run home to avoid bursting into tears right there and then. Not that anyone would have noticed, she thought. Not in this dark.

Sometimes she sat in her old room. She still had some of the instruments that he had made especially for her when he had taught her how to play, fine in their craftsmanship, far too elaborate for a beginner. Except she had become quite good at the harp and the lute, in the end, and people complemented her on her voice, at least when he was not there to compare to. But he had always been the one to laud her the most, to heap praise upon her efforts.

She desperately wished she had the heart to burn them, but she did not, they were too fine, too beautiful. Instead she packed the musical instruments carefully in their cases, putting with them her sheet music (much of the handwriting was his elegant, flowing script) into a trunk which she heaved into the attic of the house herself, out of sight if not out of mind.

Sometimes, in those first few days, she hoped desperately that she was pregnant. She had read stories of the Outer Lands, from Cuiviénen itself, in which the hero would leave his lady, going off to fight evil heroically, and usually something terrible would befall him. But the lady, in those stories, would be pregnant, and the child would grow up to look just like its poor tragically snatched-before-his-time father, and would go on to make things right again in the world.

She was not pregnant, of course. It had been a vain hope anyway, for Eru to bless them at such a time when he never had before.  _Probably for the best_ , she reflected.  _Perhaps the One had not wanted to bring their child into the world only to see what its father would become._ And this was anything but one of those stories, told in play or dance, music or verse, or written in Rúmil’s script in dusty books of children’s tales in the palace library. Macalaurë and his father and brothers were no heroes, off to battle evil valiantly. For them there would be no redemption, she was certain. The thought made her feel dizzy, sick, pain tugging like a fishhook in her stomach.  

Nerdanel came to see her. There was little they could say to each other, but there was also little that needed to be said. A simple touch was enough, a kind word, someone who  _understood._ And Nerdanel did understand. 

Mírilindë regretted. She regretted leaving with him to start with, and she regretted coming back. She regretted the whole accursed business, and yet, maddeningly, she loved him still. The pain did not fade, ever boring into her skull like a melody that echoes around the head; she knew it would never cease. But she grew slowly accustomed to it, as one tends to. The pain was part of her now, impossible to cut away without cutting out her very heart itself. It took a long time, but she was learning to edge around it, to not allow it to break her into pieces day by day.

One day, she knew, she would see him again. She was determined that it would be so. She did not know how, or what she would do when she did, but until then he would survive. She would live on. It was not even in question.


End file.
